Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII (2002)

B+
SDG

"You can punish her, you can christen her, you
can do what ever you want — only keep her alive." With that
heartbreaking plea, a Jewish mother in Poland left her
three-year-old daughter in a Catholic household where, she hoped,
the girl would go undetected by the Nazis and survive the coming
holocaust.

Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During
WWII, directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Aviva Slesin,
who is herself a childhood Holocaust survivor hidden from the
Nazis by a Lithuanian Christian family, is an uplifting,
shattering, heartfelt tribute to the Gentile families across
Europe from Poland to the Netherlands who risked their own lives
to take in and hide Jewish children in their homes. Based
entirely on interviews with the Jewish survivors and with their
rescuers and parents, Secret Lives explores the
devastating impact of the Holocaust even on those who survived
it, as well as the nobility and heroism displayed by many during
one of the darkest chapters of human history.

Not all the stories are equally inspiring. One survivor
remembers the war years with his rescuer family as the happiest
time of his childhood; another was always acutely aware of not
belonging; still another spent the war sitting trancelike in a
chair in a wardrobe. Some of the rescued children were always
conscious of their Jewish identity as the reason for their
persecution, but one girl absorbed the evidently antisemitic
attitudes of her rescuers to such an extent that she refused to
believe she was Jewish, and responded to her mother’s return at
the end of the war by screaming, "Keep your Jewish hands off
me!"

Another source of post-war heartache concerns the fate of
children whose parents never returned. Some rescuer families
wanted to adopt their children, but the decimated Jewish
community wanted surviving Jewish children to be raised in Jewish
households. One girl was taken from a loving Catholic family and
placed with relatives who abused her.

Slesin records these difficult and ambiguous circumstances
with clear-eyed sobriety, yet in the end her film remains a
testimonial to human goodness. Lives were saved. It is an
"absolute good." The Nazi nightmare ended the day a boy ran down
a Dutch street jubilantly crying, "I’m a Jew! I’m a Jew!"